Biography

On the day we meet in a West London pub, La Roux AKA South Londoner Elly Jackson’s ‘In For The Kill’ has just risen up the charts to number two. Two days later, it’ll go up again to the top. By that point it had already spent a month in the higher reaches of the chart, gradually transforming itself from a debut single to a bona fide public phenomenon.
Elly Jackson - as she’s known off stage - first discovered music in her dad’s Neil Young and Nick Drake records. From here she picked up a guitar and started writing her own music, debuting early versions of future electronic hits like ‘Quicksand’ on the South London folk scene. Fortunately, as she strummed away at one house party, a songwriter called Ben Langmaid was watching and soon they were studio partners. “One day me and Ben were working on a song and starting playing with some of the synths lying around at Ben’s. We put a synth line over the acoustic track we had been working on and it just took off. From that day the guitar started to seem a little obsolete to us.”
Discovering a shared love of the polish and poise of eighties synth pop, Elly and Ben worked together for over a year before news started to filter out to record labels that something special was happening. “Out of nowhere there was suddenly loads of interest,” Elly remembers. “But some of the labels wanted to split us up and wanted me to go and work with other people and I was like ‘this is stupid, it doesn’t make any sense, you said you loved the demo’s and you loved what we’d done together and then you wanna go rip it up and tear it apart, I don’t understand how that works’, we were both baffled by it. Just because he wasn’t a known name in the industry and he wasn’t a known writer, or a known producer, no-one kind of trusted him, no-one wanted to take the risk, and we just started getting really fed up with it. So he said, “Why don’t we make it a band and then they can’t do anything?” and so that was the way we did it.” And so La Roux was born, culling their name from a book of French baby names found in a skip. “I opened it, and on the first page was La Roux – the red headed one” For the part-French Elly it was perfect. “We write together, but all the songs are about me and my experiences. There are no throwaway lyrics on the record, everything is there for a reason, though I don’t like going into it too much, I don’t want to tell people what they’re supposed to think about my songs.”
Combining both visual glamour and sonic drama, La Roux have made the oddest of things, a populist album which doesn’t patronize the populous.

Please note that Insanity represent La Roux for DJ Bookings only.

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